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The Woman in Black Introduction

In A Nutshell

Turn on all the lights and crank up some cheerful music, because you're going to need it with this one. (Or, hey, light a candle and put on the haunted house soundtrack, if being scared is more your thing.) Because our hero, young solicitor—that's "lawyer" for the Americans in the audience—Arthur Kipps, ends up being involved in a little more than he bargained for.

Although Susan Hill's Woman in Black was published in 1983, you won't find shoulder pads or frizzy hair. Instead, it's full of steam trains and newfangled contraptions called "horseless carriages." And we start off with Arthur Kipps, the solicitor in question, enjoying the holidays with his family. His second family.

Can you guess where this is going yet?

When the kids start to tell ghost stories, Arthur gets upset and flustered and abruptly leaves the house without explaining why. (How British of him!) It turns out that he has his own ghost story, and we hear it in flashback:

As a young solicitor fairly new into his career, he's sent to a small town to settle the affairs of an old woman who's recently died. When Kipps arrives he finds that the locals are decidedly unfriendly. And then the creepy things start happening—like repeated sighting of a frighteningly ill woman dressed all in black. Thus begins his descent into true heart-pounding horror as he tries to figure out the story behind the mysterious woman in black.

Does this sound like the perfect set up for a movie? You're not the only one to think so. It was adapted for TV in 1989, and then became a radio show in both 1993 and 2004. In 2012, it was adapted again, starring Mr. Harry Potter himself. And if there's one thing we've learned from horror movies, it's that the dead are never really gone.

Why Should I Care?

And the cool thing about The Woman in Black is that it's a tribute to where the genre all started: the gothic literature of the late eighteenth century. We're not talking splatter films or torture porn. We're talking about the good stuff: the kind of story that doesn't need to shed a single drop of blood to keep you gripping the edge of your seat and leaving the lights on all night.